


The Hours

by alienor_woods



Series: We're Going Down [1]
Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Gen, Modern Royalty
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-25
Updated: 2017-10-25
Packaged: 2019-01-23 00:59:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,374
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12494852
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alienor_woods/pseuds/alienor_woods
Summary: While Jon and Sansa beguile the masses in King’s Landing, the Starks pass a day in Winterfell.[Set after Chapter 5 of As Long As We're Going Down]





	The Hours

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Snacky](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Snacky/gifts).



>  
> 
>   
> 

_i. Arya_

 

The sun is finally hauling itself over Winterfell’s curtain walls when Arya closes the door behind her and heads across the gateyard towards Winterfell’s kitchen. Her breath mists in the chilly air, and the grass crunches under her boots. It’s late summer, and the nights are setting light layers of frost over the outside world. It’s a long enough walk across the wide lawn that her fingertips start to tingle, and she sticks them deep into the front pocket of her jumper. There’s a snarl and a thump, and then her brothers’ wilding shepherds Summer and Shaggydog tear out from behind the laundry, playfighting. Nymeria, who had been trotting at Arya’s heels, yips in happiness and goes sprinting across the grass to join her littermates in their morning tussle.

Arya rounds a corner and hops up the step to the double glass doors set into the rough old stone of the original kitchen building. She can see Gendry and Bran are at the old staff table on the other side, sipping coffee and chatting with the circulating kitchen staff. “Morning, sis,” Bran says when she steps over the threshold. Miss Bea Cassel calls out from the back corner that _the coffee is fresh n’ strong, like your laddie over there._

“Is that so?” Arya drawls. Gendry winks at her over the rim of his coffee cup. Miss Bea passes her the sugar and then fusses at a group of nearby caterers to _not go anywhere near the butter in the Household refrigerator, I need it for Lord Stark’s dinner later_. There’s a wedding booked in the sept this afternoon with a cocktail hour and seated tea in the glass gardens, so the castle’s event staff is already hard at work whirling trays and crates around the wide-open kitchen. Until pretty recently, there were walls that separated different rooms of the kitchens. The Starks hadn’t cared about changing that, either, and the staff had had to just make-do up until Catelyn Tully had moved in. Arya had seen the pictures her mother had taken as “before” pictures; they were faded amber now and grainy at best, but she could still make out the red vintage ranges and wood-paneled cabinets in cramped nooks and crannies. One little room was so awkardly sized that the staff had just simply sat a fridge in it, but nothing else. It was Arya’s favorite picture of the bunch. Just a stone room with a bare lightbulb and a free-standing fridge.

She takes a blueberry muffin from a basket and swings her legs over the bench at the table to sit beside Gendry. “How’re things at the garage?”

“Done for the morning.” He’s still in his black driver’s jacket, Stark direwolves embroidered at each shoulder. “Your parents went to a doctor’s appointment in the city, so I took Rickon to school and then helped Jonny move all the Household cars back behind the inner walls. They want me to valet tonight, are you alright with that?”

Arya nods. “Of course.”

“You sure? I know you wanted to go try out that new pub in Crow’s Rest…”

“No, it’s fine,” she insists, peeling down the paper wrapping of her muffin. “This actually works out. Hotpie wants to watch the game, and he’ll be happy to come hang out in here.”

Bran chuckles and points out the four-tiered wedding cake across the kitchen. “He might cry in happiness when he sees that.”

“Hey.” Gendry jerks his chin at the TV. “Isn’t that your uncle?”

On the screen at the foot of the table, her mother’s brother, Brynden Tully, strides across a cobblestone street and towards a stone archway, a press line held back by velvet ropes. He’s a big man with a full beard and silver-black hair pulled back into a rakish queue at the nape of his neck. Arya thinks he looks very trim and fit in his tuxedo. Then Brynden goes out of sight through the arch, and the camera cuts back to the talking heads. Their mouths move, but the sound is muted. “Turn it up,” Arya says, and Bran points the remote at the television.

“—en Tully, arriving at the Florent’s private brownstone on last night for a white-tie dinner,” the female guest was saying. Elena Whitecloak, Royal Correspondent, read her byline. “Lord Brynden is the younger brother of the departed Lord Hoster Tully, and he also is a retired Blackfish of the Freshwater Navy and saw extensive combat in service to Lord Robb Stark during the War of the Five Kings.”

The host, a slender man with trendy half-moon glasses sitting on the end of his nose, nodded. “Yes, Lord Brynden is attending the wedding festivities in King’s Landing as House Tully’s official representative, isn’t he? Would you explain to our viewers what that means? After all, it’s been what, twenty-five years since we’ve seen a royal wedding?”

“That’s right, Wren. Our last truly ceremonial royal wedding was Cersei Lannister and Robert Baratheon. More recently, Margaery Tyrell and Renly Baratheon were married, but that wedding was very sudden—closer to an elopement than what we are watching now with the Princess Shireen and Prince Quentyn.” As Elena spoke, producers cut through photographs of the weddings in question. Arya squinted; seeing Cersei fucking Lannister looking happy, hopeful, as she’s caught mid-rush to the waiting carriage under raining confetti, is incredibly unnerving. Margaery and Renly’s pictures are from the set they sold to the media, and the two of them look statuesque and serene as they kneel before the Highgarden Septon. Margaery’s dress is cut scandalously low across her her back, but Renly doesn’t seem like he’s noticed.

 _It’s not nice to gossip about the dead_ , Septa Mordane’s voice rings through her head, And Arya shoves away her snarky thoughts and tunes back into Elena’s actually-not-that-bad commentary about ceremonial protocol. Each Great House is required to send at least one representative to take part in the ceremony, so as to bind the participation of each house in the event. And because Arya’s uncle Edmure and his wife, Roslin Frey, recently had their second baby, Brynden had come south to personify House Tully. “And this is still taken quite literally, to a degree that can seem antiquated to Westeros’s smallfolk,” Elena is saying. “This is Brynden’s cumberbund shown here. Wow, this detail is amazing—but do you see the embroidery and beading? We see here the life cycle of the Tully Trout—its birth from a clutch of eggs, its maturity in the shadow of Riverrun, and finally its spawning and death, but death given to bring life once more. This is Edric Baratheon’s cumberbund — he’ll be a groomsmen for Prince Quentyn — and you see the same thing. That’s Storm’s End there on his left side, near the hip, and I count two, three stags? That bit there looks like the start of another antler rack but don’t quote me on that.”

“Edric Baratheon will be one of the groomsman, you said. Who else do we have? Garlan Tyrell from Highgarden, Trystane Martell from Sunspear, but we also have Dickon Tarly? Devan Seaworth?” Wren looks up from his cards at Elena, looking perfectly faux-puzzled. “Those aren’t Great Houses, Elena, so what’s going on there?”

“Thanks to the War of the Five Kings, we’re dealing not only with tradition and protocol, but politics,” Elena said, sounding for all the world like this was the exact question she had been waiting for. “What you are seeing there are rising stars and proven allies of Houses Baratheon and Martell. Let’s go ahead and do roll call on the ceremony, so we have a better picture. As groomsmen, we have Trystane Martell, serving as Best Man, and then we have Edric Baratheon, Garlan Tyrell, Dickon Tarly, Edric Dayne, Devan Seaworth, and Erren Florent. Queen Selyse is from House Florent, and the Tarlys are close cousins; Ser Davos Seaworth is, of course, serving as Hand to King Stannis.” The screen flickered with images of these young men all arriving at the same address, their cumberbunds all ablaze with the traditional imagery of their houses.

“We’re seeing it with the bridesmaids as well,” Elena continues. Arianne’s black gown serves as a perfect backdrop for her orange-and-red sash, giving her the air of a seasonally-appropriate harvest goddess. Margaery Baratheon is in all-black, too, and Elena sounds salaciously giddy when she points out that her sash incorporates both the Baratheon stag and Tyrell rose. “Now, Queen Selyse was the only other woman at the dinner who incorporated the sigils of both her matrimonial house and her birth house on her regalia last night,” she comments. “But she is, of course, the queen. We see Elinor Ambrose, formerly Tyrell, here and she doesn’t have any Tyrell roses on her sash, and there—Leonette Fossoway has kept her maiden name for her books, of course, but you see on her sash—yes, that’s a great picture—we see _only_ Tyrell roses.”

“Yes,” Wren agreed. “We have reached out to the Red Keep as to whether the Lady Margaery has some special status within House Baratheon, but they have not yet gotten back to us. So let’s talk about the other members of the wedding party. Margaery Baratheon is serving as matron of honor, and Elinor Ambrose is a bridesmaid. And, who could have forgotten this young woman right there, Lady Sansa of House Stark—” Wren gestured at the inset picture of Sansa and Jon. Bran and Arya catch each other’s eyes across the table, then they both look back at the television where Sansa is frozen mid-stride, her hand tucked into Jon’s elbow. The camera pans down the detailing of her sash, where a wolf pup grows up to howl at the full moon, while Wren goes on to ask “—but who else can we expect to see standing beside Princess Shireen on her wedding day?”

Elena rattles off the names of the bridal party, each of which flashes by on the screen: Along with Margaery, Arianne, Elinor, and Sansa, Shireen would be preceded down the aisle of the Sept of Baelor by Wynafryd Manderly, Ashara Greyjoy, and Myranda Royce. Elena notes that the Lady Myranda is an interesting choice, given King Stannis’ disdain for excessive drink and frolic and Lady Myranda’s adoration for those very things, _but she and Princess Shireen were classmates at Oldtown University, Wren, so the Princess might have put her foot down._

“Why was Lady Sansa the one to go?” Miss Bea asks Arya, pouring her a fresh mug of coffee. “If you don’t mind me asking. You’re just as pretty as her, you know, I’ve always said so.”

Bran catches Arya’s eye and hides his smile behind his coffee cup. The housekeeper’s adoration for the family’s tomboy was an ill-kept secret around the castle. The camera slowly pans up the length of Wynafryd Manderly’s gown, trumpeted from the knees and sweeping dramatically behind her on the King’s Landing cobblestones. “Mama and Robb didn’t send me because I look weird in fashion,” Arya jokes drily.

“They didn’t send you because you suck at small talk,” Gendry corrects her.

“I’ll have you know that I’m fine with small talk!”

He rolls his eyes. “Don’t you remember the midsummer’s gala? You flat out told Lady Harwin her daughter was fat.”

“Which daughter? Ellarya? She _is_ fat,” Arya insists. Gendry slaps the table and points at her, amazed that he’s proved her point so quickly. She huffs. “It’s not an insult! She’s just…a big girl!” But he’s just watching her with a bemused smile on his face, so she dusts her hands off over her plate and swipes her hair back behind her ears with a flippant shrug. “ _Whatever_. I hate that place anyway and Sansa does, too. It’s not like we were _fighting_ for the spot.”

Bran is watching them with an amused expression. “Well, one thing is for sure,” he says, nodding at where Sansa is standing with her arm linked through Ashara Greyjoy’s, their heads bent together as if sharing a secret. “Sansa’s grasp on optics is better than all of ours put together.”

“You’re not wrong,” Arya agrees. The final picture on the newscast is of a circle of personalities standing on the second-floor balcony of the Florent house. Of all the people captured on the screen, Sansa is the only one who seems to have noticed the cameras. She makes eye-contact with the viewer, champagne flute held between her manicured fingertips, Jon’s hand low on her back. “She was always the best at pretending.”

 

_ii. Bran_

 

Bran's grateful for the cold when he leaves the gym. With Summer loping at his side, he pumps his arms and gets some speed going across the gateyard. The wind pushes his hair back off of his forehead and he breathes in the sharp autumn air. He takes a sharp right with just enough recklessness to make his stomach swoop—it’s almost the same feeling as when he’d gone climbing, hopping from ledge to ledge until he’d gotten as high up as possible and he could look out over the moors all the way to the grey-green smudge of of the Wolfswood on the horizon.

Down the straightaway behind the garages, Bran lets the chair coast while he stretches his arms up and over his head. His shoulders ache like a beast, probably from the unassisted pull ups he’d done. Osha isn’t going easy on him anymore. _You're strong enough now,_ she had told him when he’d wanted to use a bungee, and demanded a full eight reps.

Bran slows down down as he approaches the First Keep, where he lives now. The irony isn’t lost on him—he lives where he nearly died. If Old Nan were still alive, he’s sure she would tell him there’s a lesson there. Summer hangs back as Bran navigates his way up to the front door and over the threshold and trots in behind him. The Old Keep’s insides have been gutted and renovated to make it livable for Bran, and he’s pretty happy with it. A lot of things had had to go, like the stairs and the narrow casements, but Bran had held his ground on the old brick and fireplaces. Catelyn and Robb had wanted to trick it out from floor to roof, installing every gadget Bran could ever want or need. And while he appreciates their sentiments, Bran wanted to keep his home feeling like…home. Right on cue, Summer, having finished lapping up a bellyful of water, finds a sunny spot near the fireplace and stretches out for a nap.

“See you in a bit, buddy,” Bran says, getting into his small lift. He closes the vintage brass gate and presses the button for the third floor. Smoothly, the lift raises him past the second floor—his bright, wide open bedroom—and stops at the topmost floor. This floor hadn’t been involved in the first round of renovations, and has only recently become Bran’s hobby project. The First Keep had been used as an unofficial storage unit for decades, so it had filled up with cast-off furniture, artwork, books, rugs, and, of course, dust.

He’d first had the worst of the junk cleared out and the room scrubbed from beams to planks. A new skylight helps bring in more natural light, and the floors have been re-planed and refinished to give Bran a smooth ride in all directions. A desk sits under the largest of the windows—the first thing he’d put up here, as it was only practical. There’s a TV hanging over the hearth, and a few chairs and bookshelves scattered around the circular room without much rhyme or reason. He’d wanted this to be a game room, some sort of multipurpose entertainment space that he could spread into over the years. But now…now it needs to be a library.

Textbooks and academic sit open on his desk and stand stacked along the wall. He’s already completely filled one bookcase with obscure mythological texts and interpretations. And the Citadel had seemed benignly amused by his requests for nearly a century of meterological records. They’d even sent him the hardcopies without being prompted. The archmaesters had sent a note along with the shipment, wishing him a quick recovery and to let the council know if he should require anymore research assistance with his “new interest.”

But this has long since passed the point of being a new interest, or even a hobby. While he’d been in a coma, he’d…dreamed. The doctors had insisted that one does not dream while in a coma, but Bran knows what he saw. Ravens against winter skies, blinding snow, sheets of clear blue ice, of great beasts and strange monsters. And when he woke up, he started reading.

He hasn’t stopped since.

At his desk, he logs into his email. Jeyne Ridger, chief scientist at the Frostfangs, has finally replied to his request. He opens the message eagerly, skimming the lines of text for her observations. _Glacial creep increased by 22%…three unique sightings of baleen whale pods at the Ice Rivers delta on average fourteen (14) days beyond typical departure date…snowpack 9% denser than 5 years ago, and 36% denser than 10 years ago…_

A grim knot tightening in his stomach, Bran forwards the email to Robb.

 

_iii. Robb_

 

Robb leaves his afternoon meeting with Lords Umber and Glover feeling like he could sleep for ten years. The administrative work of running the North isn't the hard part, nor are the public appearances and speeches. No, the hardest part of all is managing the personalities that bicker and snipe and compete for attention.

Satin has waited patiently outside the private dining room, fingers flying over his phone’s screen. He inclines his head in deference as their guests pass him by. He falls into step with Robb and they head towards the suite of solars, still in use by the Lords Stark centuries later.

"Anyone waiting on me inside?" Robb asks.

"No, my lord.”

"Thank the Gods," Robb mutters.

“However,” Satin adds, cutting him an amused glance. "Lady Stark did ask to be informed when you left your meeting."

Robb runs a hand through his hair. _Had his father always been this harried?_ They draw close to the door, and Robb sets his hand on the handle. Satin waits with an expression of only mild expectancy. "I’ll see her. Just—give me a few minutes."

Inside, Robb's desk—Lord Stark’s desk—is cluttered with papers and folders. A desktop sits at one end of the desk; Robb’s laptop lies closed and askew on the coffee table in the sitting area. The built-in cabinetry holds a private library that generations of Stark men had cultivated and refined, and there’s a fire going in the hearth. Three flat televisions hang in a line across a far wall, powered on but muted, with closed captioning running across the bottom of the scree.

Robb pulls his lighter and a cigarette from his top drawer and crosses to the large bay window. "Hey boy, did you have a good nap?" he croons to Grey Wind while he lifts the sash. The dog, curled up into a donut on a plush dog bed, blinks up at him, yawns, then sneezes. Robb chuckles and cups his hand against the chilly autumn breeze to light his cigarette. "Consider me jealous."

As Robb drags on his cigarette, he watches Prince Quentyn's give a muted speech at King's Landing University, where the Martells are endowing a building to mark the occasion of the wedding. Robb’s quite happy that, between the royal wedding, Edmure and Roslin’s baby, and—he feels a twinge of shame—Sansa and Jon’s elopement, the entertainment feeds have given speculation on his own romantic entanglements a break. A few months back, he’d taken pretty Jeyne Westerling up on her invitation for one long weekend at her family’s summer cottage, you’d have thought he’d proposed marriage and readied a nursery at Winterfell. Robb blows a stream of smoke out the window, remembering with a tinge of bitterness how Sybell Spicer’s exuberant guided tour of the cottage for W7 cameras hadn’t exactly helped matters, either.

The feed covering the University Speech switches back to the anchor desk. The three-headed Targaryen Dragon appears in an inset, and the words "ouster" and "takeover" in the close-captioning catches Robb's attention. He turns up the volume.

"--surprise Dragon Manufacturing Board of Governors vote called today in Mereen. By a vote of 6 to 3, the Board elected to oust Rhaegar and Viserys Targaryen as joint CEOs and replace them with the youngest of the Targaryen siblings, Daenerys. It appears as though Daenerys has been colluding with members of the Board for quite some time, preparing for and, perhaps, encouraging this vote." The young woman in question appears on the screen, dressed in a smart black sheath dress and her platinum hair twisted into a chignon. She strides confidently across the plaza between Mereen's pyramids toward a podium, flanked the whole way by a team of swarthy bodyguards. Robb pegs them as Dothraki almost instantly. Her husband died a few years back, but it looks as though, somehow, Daenerys has kept the loyalty of Drogo's men.

The door clicks open. Catelyn's mouth tightens when she sees her eldest son perched on the windowsill, cigarette in hand, but she chooses not to comment on it. "How were Jon and Galbart?" she asks instead.

Robb waves his hand. He doesn't want to talk about it. "Have you seen this?" Robb gestures at the screen. Catelyn shakes her head.

“…moving forward into the future,” Daenerys is saying, reading from conveniently-prepared remarks. “My brothers’ adherence to traditional business models has kept the family business secure and safe for years, so I offer to them my sincere gratitude and appreciation. However, we must leap forward boldly, and to be bold we must abandon old ways of thinking, old ways of working, old ways of being. I am aware of my youth, and of my sex, and of how many outsiders may doubt the Board’s common sense. To those people, I say only that with great risk comes great reward. Thank you.”

Catelyn hums. “Well, that’s unexpected.”

“She’s got something up her sleeve,” Robb agrees, stubbing out his cigarette on the sill. “Satin said that you were looking for me. Is it about Bran’s email? I think we need to increase our investment in commercial greenhouses—”

Catelyn waves her hand. “Yes, I saw it but we have more pressing concerns.”

Robb thinks Bran would disagree with her, but he returns his mother’s favor and bites down the snarky comment.

“Sansa and Jon should do the Winter City Theater premiere together,” Catelyn says, business-like. “And Bran is still scheduled to do the HMS Oldstone christening alone, but they should go with him to that, as well.”

Robb frowns at her. “Just the other night, you told me that you thought they should lie low after the honeymoon,” he reminds her. “I already have Satin preparing the White Harbor flat for them.” It was in a secluded, up-town area of the city known to be hostile to paparazzi and fame seekers. He’s picked it on his mother’s recommendation, for gods’ sake.

“Yes, well,” Catelyn clears her throat. “My thinking has changed somewhat.” And she tells Robb what she says Arya had told her—that Jon and Sansa were up to something, and that they had to keep their heads down, and that it was something that had to do with the King. And from there, Cat had paid a personal visit to Sam Tarly’s office and extracted all of the nitty gritty details about the falsification of the wedding license.

By the time she's done, Robb wants another cigarette. His first impression is to remind himself to never cross his mother. His second impression is of anger: that Stannis Baratheon would stick his nose into the domestic affairs of another Great House, much less to order a marriage of the eldest daughter without the consent of the head of House. And finally: relief. Relief that he hadn’t been so oblivious these past years. Relief that his little sister was so sharp. Relief that Sansa had once again kept a small secret to keep a bigger one. And relief that his best friend hadn’t been lying to his face for years on end. And still, tingling at the back of his mind—a twinge of resentment at being the last to know.

Of course, he had refused to take their calls up until now, he reminds himself.

“What do we do, then?” he asks, the petulance not yet clear of his throat. “Just pretend they’re married forever?”

His mother raises an eyebrow at his tone, and he can’t blame her. He’s been serving as the acting Warden of the North for years, despite still at times feeling like a witless sixteen-year-old busboy who’s been given the keys to the restaurant. “Let’s get them north of the Neck,” she replies, cooly, “and we’ll take it from there.”

There’s a knock at the door, which saves Robb from having to make the obvious change of subject. Satin’s come to fetch him for a phone conference with the Banners. Robb stands and gives his mother a deferential bow, apologizing for having to cut their conversation short. “Unfortunately, duty calls.”

The smile Catelyn gives him is small. Tired. “It always does.”

 

_iv. Catelyn_

 

Catelyn makes her way to the godswood under the setting sun, Miss Bea and Edd at her side and Grey Wind at her heels. At the gate, she has to stop to adjust the shawl around her shoulders.

“The nights are getting chillier day by day, it feels like,” Miss Bea says, commiserating. “His Lordship won’t be able to sit out here so late once the snows come.”

Catelyn shares a knowing glance with Miss Bea and opens the gate to the godswood so Grey Wind can trot through ahead of them. He heads off towards the koi pond that Ned had dug in for Catelyn on their ten year anniversary. He likes to perch at the edge and watch the fish, pawing gently at the water and barking at the ruckus he creates among the koi. She’s had to take over some of Ned’s duties ever since he came home from King’s Landing, which means that she can’t spend as much time there as she used to, or as she wants to.

Ned is by the heart tree, as usual, reading quietly under the old oil lamp Lord Jonnel had installed. Ghost had been curled up at his feet but had sprung up to join his litter mate at the koi pond. The two dogs mouth at each other’s necks in greeting and scuffle on the pond’s small bridge before Grey Wind huffs at Ghost and they settle on a low, flat rock.

Ned marks his page with a bookmark as the group approaches. “Evening, m’Lord,” Miss Bea says brightly, setting her tray down on a stump. Deftly, she removes the saucer from the mouth of the mug of tea before passing it to Catelyn, who passes it to Ned. In the rhythm that comes from months, years, of the same process, Edd and Miss Bea smoothly unfold a mobile two-person dinner service for the Lord and Lady of Winterfell.

Ned spends most of his days alone, away from the hustle and bustle of the castle that can easily over overstimulate him. Miss Bea’s chatter helps bring him back to the present, prepares him to re-enter the keep for the evening, but her Northern brogue keeps it comforting and soothing, rather than jarring. She fills the empty space of the godswood as she prepares their dinner, throwing in bits of kitchen politics that make Ned’s lips curve into a small smile. Grateful to Miss Bea’s ability to carry on a delightful conversation with absolutely no one at all, Catelyn shakes out the flannel blanket she’s brought in her bag and wraps it around his shoulders and helps Edd get the trays rocked down through the leaf litter onto solid footing.

Once the places are laid, Miss Bea sets her hands on her waist. “Is there anything else I can get for you, m’Lord? M’Lady?”

Ned shakes his head. “No, thank you, Miss Bea. It looks delicious, as usual.”

“Well,” she harrumphs, “not for want of black pepper, but I’ll get that sorted by tomorrow. You two eat up, now, and make sure you get inside before the frost fae come ‘round.”

“We will,” Catelyn reassures her, and Miss Bea and Edd head back towards the keep.

Ned dutifully tucks into his warm dinner. Miss Bea has prepared a hearty venison and squash pasta dish along with roasted sprouts and some savory oatcakes to soak up the juices. Not for the first time, Catelyn is grateful that Ned’s appetite hasn’t been a problem since he returned from King’s Landing. His heart and nerves are fragile from his months in the dark, but he can still clear his plates without prompting.

Between bites, they compare their days. Arya had come by to see him after lunch, and Bran during tea, and he’d finished the latest Tarryn Bridgewater novel before starting a re-read of one of his old favorites. Catelyn tells him that Rickon received full marks on his latest literature exam but that he’s still struggling with mathematics, and that Samwell had approved the latest batch of photographs of Sansa and Jon to be run in newspapers.

“Do you want to see?” she asks, fishing her phone from her pocket.

He takes the device in hand and and flicks slowly from photo to photo. Here and there, he pauses to zoom in on their faces. Catelyn had done the same earlier today, taking in the details of her daughter's smile and the tilt of Jon's head.

"She looks happy," Ned finally says, his voice quiet. "Jon, too."

"Sansa always has been good with the press," Catelyn remarks conversationally. For weeks, Catelyn had been worried that Sansa had made fatal missteps that the House would be sorting out for years to come. But sorting through what Arya had told her, and what Samwell had (reluctantly) confirmed, had only driven home what an astute and aware daughter she had.

Ned hums and flicks backwards a few times. He zooms in again on their faces, Sansa leaning in to say something to Jon. "It's in the eyes," he says.

Catelyn had seen it, too. The obvious closeness between Jon and Sansa is another layer to add to the mystery of it all, but she knows it will take time yet to get to the bottom of it. After all, Catelyn’s first thoughts had been for the family, for Robb, for Ned. Sansa’s needs had seemed selfish, back then. Catelyn had withdrawn her support and her affection, thinking that a stiff upper lip is what Sansa needed to be faced with. It had been a knee-jerk reaction, and now Catelyn is paying for it. Just like she hadn’t responded to Sansa’s coded messages with the help she deserved, Catelyn’s questions won’t get answers hand-delivered, with bows on top.

For a minute, she thinks about spilling it all to Ned. Telling him that it’s all a big lie, that Sansa and Jon aren’t married, and they never had been. That Stannis had tried to marry off Sansa, but that she had outmanouvered him, and yanked Jon along with her for the ride. That everything since then has been a performance, a life-not-life, and that Sansa and Jon are playing with Baratheon fury and winning.

But as soon as the impulse comes, it’s gone. Ned’s health is still far too precarious for sudden jolts, as the first revelation of a secret marriage had proved. Maybe one day, when all of this was over, and Sansa and Jon are safely back North of the Neck, maybe then she would tell him.

But for now, Catelyn wants to sit with Ned, their bellies full, their arms looped together, enjoying the slow sink of the day into night.

**Author's Note:**

> Comments are always appreciated.


End file.
